Mandarin · 4 beginner lessons

Mandarin After 60, four phrases at a time

Phrases you would actually use in a real conversation. See it, hear it, say it aloud, then check yourself. Tones matter, but they are something to listen for — not a test to pass first.

Audio practice

Listen & Repeat

Play Mandarin phrases automatically and practice without pressing Play each time.

Open Listen & Repeat

Course progress

4 lessons

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Lesson 1 of 4

Hello

Four phrases that carry a first exchange: a greeting, a question, an answer, and a thank you.

Reading the pinyin: pinyin spells out the pronunciation, and the marks above the vowels show the tones — the pitch movement that is part of the word itself. Changing a tone can change the meaning, so listen first and imitate what you hear. Let the marks become a guide rather than a test.

你好
Hello
Pinyin: nǐ hǎo
Two third tones in a row are not both said as written — the first rises, so this comes out closer to ní hǎo. Listen for it rather than forcing the marks.
你好吗？
How are you?
Pinyin: nǐ hǎo ma?
吗 (ma) turns a statement into a yes-or-no question. It carries no tone of its own and no meaning you can translate — it simply marks the sentence as a question.
我很好。
I'm doing well
Pinyin: wǒ hěn hǎo
很 (hěn) means “very”, but here it is just the ordinary link between “I” and “good”. This is “I'm well”, not “I'm very well”.
谢谢。
Thank you
Pinyin: xièxie
The second syllable is unstressed and toneless — it drops away lightly rather than repeating the falling tone of the first.

Knowledge check

Someone greets you and says 你好吗？ What are they asking?

Mission 1

Stay in the Conversation

You can try this mission now. It uses phrases from Lessons 1–4.

Start Mission 1

Audio practice

Listen & Repeat

Hear each Mandarin phrase and say it aloud, up to five times, without pressing Play each time.

Open Listen & Repeat

Why Mandarin

A language where the difficulty sits somewhere new

This is a beginning, not a report from the far side. I am starting Mandarin, and these lessons record the first steps rather than teaching from experience I do not yet have.

Every language puts its hardest problem in a different place. Russian puts it in the alphabet and the case endings. Mandarin puts almost none of it there — there are no verb conjugations to memorise, no genders, no plurals, no tenses to inflect. The sentence structure is often simpler than English.

What it asks for instead is your ear. Pitch movement is part of the word, so the same syllable said with a different tone is a different word. For someone who has spent a life listening to music, that is an unusually inviting place for the difficulty to live — and a genuinely new one after Spanish and Russian.

Characters come later. These first lessons show Simplified characters alongside pinyin so the writing becomes familiar by exposure, but nothing here asks you to write them from memory. Speaking and understanding come first.

The Russian lessons run on the same four-phrases-a-lesson shape, and what Spanish taught me explains the method underneath both.